Hoping to reconnect with his music and shatter the artistic block that’s plagued his career, Stephen Hoffman, an arrogant young American piano prodigy, ventures to Vienna and finds himself in the hands of a passionate master-teacher. It seems impossible that they will ever get along, much less work together. One is European, one American; one old-fashioned, the other modern; one passionate, the other technically precise; and finally, one a seeming anti-Semite, and the other a Jew. Only music—their one common bond—releases the burning emotions of the teacher and melts the frigidity of the student.